" Or should one condemn an economic system that gave some families mansions on Summit Avenue and left others so poor that they would risk their children and their own lives for the sake of a single cow? They called it “The School Children’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were so young—but in a way the entire pioneer period was a kind of children’s disaster. Children were the unpaid workforce of the prairie, the hands that did the work no one else had time for or stomach for. "

― David Laskin , The Children's Blizzard